Reagan's Movie

[Terrance]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/fitzgerald-blue.html

In the mid-eighties Dr. Michael Rogin, a political
        scientist at the University of California at
Berkeley,
        published a series of scholarly papers making a case
        that Reagan's thinking was profoundly influenced by
the
        movies he had starred in. The thesis seemed
plausible
        to journalists covering Reagan, for by then many of
        them had noticed that Reagan took some of his best
        material from the screen. For one thing, he had a
habit
        of quoting lines from the movies without
attribution.
        For example, his famous retort to George Bush during
        the primary debate in Nashua, New Hampshire, "I'm
        paying for this microphone," came from a film called
        State of the Union. For another thing, he sometimes
        described movie scenes as if they had happened in
real
        life. Speaking to the Congressional Medal of Honor
        Society in December 1983, he told a World War II
        story of a B-17 captain whose plane had been hit and
        who was unable to drag his wounded young ball-turret
        gunner out of the turret; instead of parachuting to
safety
        with the rest of the crew, the captain took the
frightened
        boy's hand and said, "Never mind, son, we'll ride it
        down together." Reagan concluded by telling the
        society that the captain had been posthumously
awarded
        the Medal of Honor. But no such person existed: the
        story came from the 1946 movie A Wing and a Prayer.
        Within a month of this event Reagan told the Israeli
        Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that the roots of his
        concern for Israel could be traced back to World War
        II, when he, as a Signal Corps photographer, had
filmed
        the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Reagan,
however,
        did not leave California during World War II; he had
        apparently seen a documentary about the camps.